Dead Poets Society Brings Prep School to Off-Broadway

Dead Poets Society, the 1989 coming-of-age movie that tonight opened as a coming-of-age off-Broadway play, is set at a boys' prep school, and, at the Classic Stage Company, it's impossible to forget that. As you enter the auditorium, the boys in the cast—six of them, fresh-faced and handsome, in crested blazers and slacks and repp ties—are milling at the front of the stage, handing you a Playbill, pointing you to your seat, and making casual conversation. The set, looming behind them in the intimate theater, is all wood and brick and chalkboards, leather-bound books and trophies, schoolhouse lights. This is Wilton Academy, "the best preparatory school in the United States," as we'll soon be informed by the headmaster, and don't you forget it.

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Jason Sudeikis resurrects the Robin Williams role of John Keating.

Joan Marcus

The ethos of the place, personified by Headmaster Nolan (David Garrison), is codified in its "four pillars," presented in the play's first scene: Tradition, honor, discipline, and excellence. But the tension of the story arrives in the person of a new teacher, John Keating, a young alumnus and lover of romantic poetry who is not entirely devoted to at least the first of those pillars. You've seen the movie: Jumping on desks, shouting Whitman.

If Wilton, and Nolan, are determined to make the boys into traditional, honored, disciplined organization men—Dead Poets is set in 1959, after all—Keating seeks to make them individuals. Gather rosebuds while ye may, he tells the boys, carpe your diems, and so on; the play is rich with the greeting-card poetry Keating uses to encourage individuality. (This cool poetry teacher, in 1959, somehow hasn't heard of a Beat.) All this free-thinking cannot, of course, end well.

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Jason Sudeikis fits the part, with his well-scrubbed good looks, and he's got Keating's mischievous glint in his eye.

Robin Williams played Keating in the movie, and he earned an Oscar nomination for it. (Tom Schulman won the Best Original Screenplay award for his script, which he adapted for this stage version.) Here, Jason Sudeikis has stepped into Williams's Oxfords. The Saturday Night Live alum acquits himself well in his stage debut. He fits the part, with his well-scrubbed good looks, and he's got Keating's mischievous glint in his eye. He is, if anything, too self-amused, too pleased with his glib cleverness. It's hard to tell, though, if that's a self-indulgent performance or the performance of a self-indulgent English teacher, and, in either case, it may be immaterial: the audience clearly adores him.

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What's a little bit harder to credit is the drama. Schulman has adapted his two-hour-and-change movie into a 95-minute play. It's a trimly efficient John Doyle staging (that great set is by Scott Pask, and all those books, taken off the bookshelves, double as chairs and desks), but there's still a feeling that some credibility has been lost in the condensing. We're repeatedly told how hard Wilton Academy is, but we rarely see the boys doing much but reading poetry and playing around. The star pupil, Neil Perry (Thomas Mann), is terrorized by his demanding father (Stephen Barker Turner), ultimately with tragic results, but it's never explained why dad's so tough. There's also an early hint of daddy issues with the shy new boy, Todd Anderson (Zane Pais), that leads to no ultimate revelation, except to set up that the boys are hungry for the nurturing father figure they'll find in Keating. For all the philosophizing, the stakes end up feeling rather low.

That's why the play's tragic climax—no spoilers, but things fall apart when Perry's dad bans him from playing Puck, because what college admissions committee would want a smart kid who also performs Shakespeare?—lands softly. The real action comes in the next scene, when the other boys, all those erstwhile free-thinkers in training, one by one sign a false confession blaming Keating for what's gone wrong. They've given in, sold him out, ignored both Keating's truth-seeking and Wilton's honor, turned back into conformists. But when Keating comes to fetch his things, it's back to the Whitman.

"O Captain! My captain!" they shout, one by one climbing on their desks. It's an empty gesture, too little too late, dramatically manipulative but also effective, and now the boys can now feel better about themselves while also irritating their headmaster. One was almost tempted, last weekend, to leave the theater and march up Fifth Avenue.

Tickets are sold out for the entire run of the show but Classic Stage Company's box office maintains a wait list that opens one hour prior to curtain time at 136 East 13th Street.

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